"Why do Historians Still Have to Go to Archives? Isn't Everything Digitized?"

[minoanmiss]

https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/25/mailbag-march-25-2019/

It strikes me that this applies to amateur collectors of knowledge as well as professional ones (or, some of the books I own will never be digitially available, and others would lose some of the experience by being digitized, such as the miniature books). It might even make a good rebuttal against the charge of "paper fetishist," but maybe such a charge isn't really worth addressing anyway.

Comments

[sovay]

It might even make a good rebuttal against the charge of "paper fetishist," but maybe such a charge isn't really worth addressing anyway.

It's a pretty silly charge.

[lunabee34]

Oh man. Yes. If I ever want to read Ouida's letters, I'll have to personally go to the various archives where they're located. *nods nods*

[jadelennox]

laughs in digital archivist

It's not even a question of digitized. As of about ten years ago, the statistic at the Boston Public Library archives was that only about 10% of the collection was catalogued. (I'm sure my dates and stats are off somewhat, but that was the general number.)

The thing is, even for born-digital materials, "it's just online" won't be a thing for the forseeable future.

Even if it weren't for:

• rights
• fragility / unscanability
• the fact that the historical importance of many artifacts simply isn't digitizable

Item level cataloguing is so incredibly difficult that it's only done for a fraction of items. Most archival collections are described at the series, box, or folder level, and historians are often the experts who can come in and do more detailed, item-level description.

And born-digital materials can't trivially go online without someone attempting to do at least high-level description. Two examples:

• a collection we got from the widow of a Big Shot. I was handed a CD-ROM and asked to figure out what the files on it were, since nobody else could open that file format. I opened the files, realized they were confidential financial information from the Big Shot's Fortune 500 company, ejected the disk, and flung it at the collection manager at the speed of light. If we had just uploaded the files without trying to understand what each item was... shudder.
• a collection of recorded interviews with scholars in a part of the world with some conflict. We brought in some graduate students to transcribe them, because subject expertise was needed. During the transcription, a student noticed that one of the interviewees said "I need you to expunge the thing I said earlier, it might paint a target on my back." The researcher wanted us to put the recordings online anyway. Luckily, we have a professional code of conduct.

And that's not even counting all the faculty hard drives we were just handed containing ... well, the entire contents of a hard drive.

I understand why people think everything should just be online these days but it's just impossible. We are so far away from processing this being something we can do usefully and ethically without skilled human intervention.

Anyway I bet you'd love Lisa Fagin Davis's blog. She's a manuscript person and she has some excellent posts on what she learns from the physical artifact.

[brooksmoses]

Yup. And a friend of mine who works at a library with a collection that has what amounts to some rather historically relevant medical records has also talked a few times about the fact that some of their collection is not going to be scanned for digital archiving even though they make it available for researchers to review on occasion -- because, being deeply personal records, they ethically need to keep the access closely controlled.

(Mostly this comes up in the context of having explained to yet another not-yet-clueful researcher who wants online access to the records why they will need to physically travel to the location for the information they want.)

Another fun example is that there isn't a good solution for digitizing materials in braille, especially for things with illustrations and maps and such where it's not just a transcription of text.

[jadelennox]

aw man the archives with a lot of braille must be awesome. checks Ooh, the archives of Perkins school for the blind look very cool, and when pandemic is over maybe I can check them out.

[caitri]

ALL THIS. ALL OF IT.

It's like after4-5 decades of consistent cuts to libraries and archives the number of people to work on stuff goes down even as the amount of stuff coming in remains the same. What is online is the tip of the iceberg, and in the meantime try talking to the human librarians, and also pretty please be nice to them because we are e x h a u s t e d .

[annonynous.livejournal.com]

Not all the aspects of a physical book can be scanned. There is something to be said for the feel of opening a book, turning the pages, perhaps even smelling the book. You can't do any of these things with a computer file.

You also can't throw a newly purchased book against a wall when it turns out not to be what you thought it would be. (:-/

And yes, to hell with anyone who would call an owner of books a paper fetishist.

Ann O.

[contrarywise]

"Paper fetishist" is really scraping the bottom of the Offended Squawking barrel.

[cmcmck]

No, it isn't and that's why discoveries are still being made!

And a lot of us adore archive work.

[corvidology]

Yes, it's a snap to digitize everything with all the piles of money and endless workforce and suitable copying equipment we have lying about.

I really need an 'eyeroll' icon. :D

[dhampyresa]

I fucking WISH this reference book was digitised instead of 4 bloody pounds >:[

Also reading on paper is much less eye-tiring than on screen. I guess that makes me a fetishist.

[magid]

I did a little work on an online project transcribing a collection of abolitionist letters at the BPL. Even when I could easily read the text for transcription, I could tell how much would be lost were a person to only read those words, rather than looking at the document itself, with the personality of handwriting, interesting papers, etc. And that's for stuff that *has* been digitized in some fashion already!

[swingandswirl]

/sighs/ digital records have their place, as do paper. I wish people (not you, hon, generalising here) understood that.

[minoanmiss]

The fight between digital and paper is just like the fight between STEM and humanities. Both are completely unnecessary and counterproductive and yet continue to hurt people.